The Midwest Democratic ‘blue wall’ came back last week…

He will have lost the edge that got him his job even after losing 3 million votes to Hillary Clinton…..

Donald Trump toppled the “blue wall” in the 2016 election, winning three Great Lakes battlegrounds his party had persistently lost for president: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

But Tuesday’s election shows how hard it may be for the president to repeat that feat in 2020, as Democrats swept contests for governor and U.S. Senate in all three states. Remember, these are the states that propelled Trump to the White House two years ago by the slimmest margin and would be key to any re-election victory.

The good news for Democrats, said Paul Maslin, a pollster for the party, was Tuesday indicated how Democrats could bounce back in all three.

“It shows how we can narrowly get over 270 (electoral votes),” Maslin said. “The bad news is, each of these states is still a huge fight.”

The battle lines in these Rust Belt states were drawn by stark political trade-offs of Trump’s Republican brand. Trump won here in 2016 when massive gains among blue-collar and rural white people outweighed his weaknesses in the suburbs and cities.

That math backfired in the midterms. The rural vote mostly held for his party. But Republicans lost ground in the suburbs and were swamped by a huge outpouring in cities of Democratic voters mobilized against the president.

In Michigan, Democrats won races for governor and U.S. Senate and picked up two GOP U.S. House seats. They stemmed their blue-collar bleeding in places and saw success in metro Detroit — urban and suburban….

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Both the Blue Wall and Trump’s red rural fastnesses seem likely to lose net seats in Congress and the Electoral College after the 2020 Census. Ohio and Pennsylvania have lost seats in almost every reapportionment, as have farm sates in the Great Plains like Kansas.

Though harder to generalise, the states that tend to gain seats have also been more likely to be purplish after 1996: e.g. the Southwest (Nev., Colo, Ariz, NM), Florida, Virginia and N. Carolina. Texas (which hasn’t voted for a Dem. Pres. candidate since 1976 or a statewide Democrat since the 1990’s) is also gaining seats, but is also coming back more into play.